


feign disorder, and crush him

by postcardmystery



Category: House of Cards (US TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-27
Updated: 2014-07-27
Packaged: 2018-02-10 16:40:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2032230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/postcardmystery/pseuds/postcardmystery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Meechum keeps Claire free of bullets. Claire keeps Meechum clean of intrigue. They live and they live and Frank is hungry, like a dog kept out in the sun, but this could be enough, if he could see fit to let it, to permit the world to get off so easy.</p><p>Meechum holds the door open; Claire’s Louboutins click through. His greatest victory: this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	feign disorder, and crush him

"He trusts us," says Claire, as he lifts his face from kissing her, and it is not an admonition. In a sense, it is not even an imbalance, for they trust him in return— although perhaps it is unbalanced, because it is with something a little less, for—

"We only trust him with our lives," says Frank, and. Claire smiles, just a little. He watches the slow tug of her mouth, and his fingers dig into the bedsheets, arms shaking with the effort of holding himself up, still. He could do nothing but watch her, until the day he dies.

"You could die in his arms," says Claire, but she’s teasing. Frank pushes his hand into her hair, class ring sliding against her scalp, and her back arches.

"I die in yours every night," he says, pushing his face into the hollow of her neck, and she digs her ankles into his back and so, and so— lay on, MacDuff, lay on.

 

 

 

"Stay with Claire," he says, a hundred times, a thousand.

His foundations are himself, stone and steel and  _blood_ , a curl to a lip he seeks to hide in company and a drawl he thickens and lessens as he sees fit. But his walls are not of himself, but Claire, and a hand on a gun, a hand lifting a gun and stepping between his wife and the world. The two sides of him, split and bettered, into a superior whole: Claire the  _art_ , Meechum the  _war_ , and of such an army Sun Tzu could merely dream.

Meechum keeps Claire free of bullets. Claire keeps Meechum clean of intrigue. They live and they live and Frank is hungry, like a dog kept out in the sun, but this could be enough, if he could see fit to let it, to permit the world to get off so easy.

Meechum holds the door open; Claire’s Louboutins click through. His greatest victory: this.

 

 

 

"It doesn’t matter what I know," says Meechum, which, in a sense, is true. His trust was earned rather than bought, although it came with what others might identify as a price tag. But Frank has bought many, many men, and Meechum is the first to leap without looking, to leap without even asking if it would be worth taking a look.

(Worth. A peculiar concept, and one Frank has always found a little slippery. Money, after all, is nothing but a fever dream, although he tends to keep that to himself in polite company, unless he particularly feels like making Claire smile.)

"You are not incorrect," says Frank, "But it matters substantially more what you don’t know. Assumin’ you’re as smart as I think you are, you’ll know why that matters."

"All that matters is what you tell me," says Meechum, and Frank wishes that he could say that his lips pressing into Frank’s ring were a surprise.

 

 

 

The ring.

In a sense, it is all he allows himself that is entirely his, of a time before he was Frank Underwood— very literally, as the man who earned that ring was Francis, the name on all his military forms. Francis spoke like trash and looked like trash, and, yes, talked back like trash, too, until he learnt that  _knives_  were how he and the back should intersect. Frank Underwood is a construct, forgotten only when his head is between Claire’s legs or alone entirely, twisting that ring and remembering long hot summers where food was scarce and beatings were many, a lifetime away. 

The ring is the purest form of himself, forged in fire and hard enough to gauge wood. It shines in the light, a distraction— one he’s needed, and there’s men out there with scars on them that ring left behind. It’s a seal, a symbol, but above all, a cypher: here is Frank Underwood, army-trained to kill you with his bare hands, a serpent’s silver tongue in his lying mouth, a hundred and fifty years of poverty bearing down, just outside the corner of your eye, but never his. You don’t know him. You aren’t even capable. You can’t even make him pause long enough to get him into focus. Stop trying, stop trying—

Now you see him, now you don’t.

You’ll never see him coming, because when you see Frank Underwood, there’s already blood on the handle of the knife.

 

 

 

"This ain’t a punishment," says Frank, and grins, to show that’s  _exactly_  what it is.

"Yes sir," says Meechum, and sweat trickles in a thin, slow line down his neck, and closes the door, ready to stand guard.

Frank fucks Claire on the desk of the Oval Office because she asked him to, and because nothing could ever be better than this, nothing, his tongue on her clit and the seal behind him and he wraps his hand into the flag when he fucks her and laughs and laughs and laughs. She is electric beneath him, and when she lifts her hands from his back, her nails have blood under them.

"I like you with blood on your hands," he whispers, after, and her eyes are a nuclear winter, they burn him and they hurt him and she is everything, everything, red seeping into his shirt and her bites on the inside of his lip.

When Meechum opens the door for her to leave, his hands are shaking.

 

 

 

"I don’t need you to ask me," says Meechum, and the blade in his hands is hypnotic, tiger-fast, "You misunderstand. You never have to ask. Give me your orders, sir."

"Oh, Edward," says Frank, hand digging into the back of Meechum’s neck, leaning in, "How greatly did I sin, to deserve you."

 

 

 

You think that he forgot you, but he didn’t.

Claire threads her hands through Meechum’s hair, the law of the jungle temporarily suspended, two predators at play. His hands are huge about her wrists, when he reaches up to catch one, but he would never press down. They are beautiful, and deadly, and beautiful because they are deadly. Deadly, even, because they are beautiful. They do not know that you are watching, but Frank does, and he smiles.

He smiles for a long time, and he says, “ _There is no creature loves me_? Ain’t that how it goes. A lie, my friend. A lie.”

You blink first.


End file.
